Can somebody help me understand how the numbers in appearance modifiers are used to determine description strings? It seems to be based on the variation of the numbers rather than the numbers themselves. I don't understand how this works though. How do you make them all show up with the same string for the appearance mod, eg "he is short" or whatever. Because giving them a range spread out but moved one way or the other doesn't seem to be it, and giving them all the same number results in them all being described as average. I don't understand how to manipulate the bell curve. In fact, I don't even want the full bell curve most of the time. I'm just trying to differentiate that some of my creatures - as a species - are all broad/tall/whatever.
How do you manipulate the variation so they always show up as one thing? How do you move it so they're all some variation of say really really low to low? like I never want some of them to be high, but it seems to make this function you *have* to have a really high value in there otherwise there is no variation and nothing for it to generate a string with.
I'm really frustrated trying to understand this. You would think that if they had a range like this:
[BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:HEIGHT:0:10:25:30:35:40:50]
where you set the lowest to 0 and the highest to 50, they're all some variation of short. What is this even out of? 100? 200? But nope that's not it, now they just have a range between 0 and 50 to track the variation of some generated numbers somewhere and compare them here??? I dont get it.
Do I do like, most of the time they'll all be really short except that 0.2% (stats was a long time ago for me) or whatever 3 deviations are, chance they're stupidly tall?:
[BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:HEIGHT:0:0:0:0:0:0:200]
I don't really want them to accidentally mutate into freakishly tall creatures just so everybody else can be short...
It sounds like that's just going to cause a bunch more problems when you combine it with length and broadness, you'll end up with this weird combination strings that seem to only be found in either the string dump or in game, making it a wild lottery as to how your creature will be described. Ugh.
If you look at nords in oldgenesis, their height mod looks like this:
[BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:HEIGHT:95:105:110:125:130:150:160]
what does that really mean? they can be 95 height to 160 height, with most of the time ending up around 125 height? that doesn't help tell me like, are they short are they tall what's going on here? they've got lots of room between the median and the highest, and not as much of a difference between the median and the lowest, im guessing that means they're capable of being tall? But that doesn't tell me like, are they *always* tall or are they just capable of being tall? how much of a difference counts?
someone please make it make sense.